Operation Owl (Beyond Fairytales)

by Tara Quan

  The footage presented a profile view of Maya lying in a bathtub. Since he could only make out her face, neck, and left arm, he didn’t see an immediate need to cease and desist. Her head rested against the tub’s lip, cushioned by her long, dark hair. With her eyes closed and lips parted, he couldn’t tell if she was conscious. What if she had slipped in the shower and hit her head?

  He cranked up the microphone’s sensitivity. The great thing about modern-day computers was their much-improved capability to process audio and video. As soon as she made a sound or moved, he’d stop watching.

  A soft, throaty moan crackled over the speakers. Her left hand lifted in the air before clenching over the side of the tub. Her back and neck arched.

  “Shit.”

  Slapping down his laptop screen, Zack leaned back against the leather headrest and massaged his temples. Struggling not to draw any conclusions, he muttered, “Don’t go there, man. Just don’t go there.”

  But the more he told himself not to think about it, the more neurons seemed to light up. He shut his eyes in an attempt to collect his thoughts, only to be presented with his brain’s detailed rendering of her exquisite face. Before he could summon the willpower to rein it in, his wayward imagination added further details, his memory of her more vivid than any webcam video. With her lids lowered, those thick, curly lashes would appear as dark fans against her sun-kissed skin. Small, straight white teeth would sink into her lower lip, reddening it as she bit down. Her cheeks would turn pink, the way they always did when he touched her. That maddening citrus and spice scent would combine with the steam, the crisp yet exotic smell luring him to perdition.

  A throaty moan twined with the erotic image. “Zack….”

  Bolting upright, he practically punched the side of his laptop in an attempt to turn down the volume. For some reason, shutting the screen hadn’t cut off the feed.

  “God…Zack…oh….”

  “Damn it, Maya, shut the hell up!” Finally managing to gain control of his index finger, he stabbed at the mute button hard enough to break it.

  His harsh breathing slashed through the dark silence. But the damage had been done. Over his briefs, the metal zipper bit into his growing arousal. He could hear his heart’s pounding rhythm in his roaring ears. A red fog colored his vision.

  With his gaze fixed on Maya’s window, all his muscles tensed as if gearing for a marathon. Cursing a blue streak, he peeled off his sweatshirt and tossed it onto the backseat. He sweated buckets despite the slight nip in the night air.

  How many Zacks did she know?

  She couldn’t have been fantasizing about him. Her body language at the gallery had made one thing abundantly clear—whatever had prompted her to kiss him five years ago was no longer in play. She’d kept her back to him for most of their damn conversation, and when she made eye contact he saw a cool reserve that hadn’t been there when they were in college. She had been casual, polite even. Though her willingness to help him spoke volumes about their friendship, she had expressed no hint there might be something more.

  Then why had she moaned his name? He shook his head so hard he felt a twinge in his neck. He wished he had a reset button so he could erase the past five minutes from memory. Spying on her had been inappropriate and a huge breach of trust. And she could just as easily have been saying “Jack,” “Mack,” or even exclaiming “ack.” Whatever the woman murmured while in the privacy of her own bathtub was none of his goddamn business.

  Who was he kidding? The probability of her fantasizing about someone whose name also started in Z and ended in K was much lower than the more-obvious conclusion. Though he chomped at the bit to do something with this discovery, tonight was the world’s least convenient time to pursue a relationship.

  And he had a plan, damn it. Get her help, lie low in some country with no extradition treaty with the United States, and use the information to clear his name. Only when he’d regained possession of his life should he ask his former best friend out on a date. After a few of those, he’d convince her to have sex—on a bed first, of course. The shower would come later.

  Chapter Three

  “There is a God,” Zack murmured as he looked up at Maya’s window and spotted her padding out of the bathroom. The thought of her in the water, of her fingers searching between those thighs—

  He pounded his fist against the dashboard, using the pain to cut off that train of thought. She approached the desk that held her Macbook, which happened to be directly in front of her bedroom’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Dual lamps lit her from behind, showcasing her hourglass silhouette. She’d turbaned her hair under a white towel, a relief since the sight of her unbound mane right now might push him off the edge. She wore a pink, lacy camisole, which left her shoulders bare but for two straps. Matching pajama shorts floated down her hips, cutting under her butt cheeks. From this distance, her shapely, golden legs seemed unending. How would it feel to have those toned limbs circling his waist, to slide against her smooth skin as he pressed into her….

  He slumped against the backrest and looked up at the car’s roof. “If this is some sort of twisted test, it’s not funny,” he muttered to no one in particular. Drawing a fortifying breath, he flipped open his laptop. With the video stream from her webcam still on, he was greeted by an image of her spreading lotion over her forearms, accompanied by a direct view of her cleavage.

  Blood surged to his groin, lifting his already engorged penis and jamming the upper ridge against the metal zipper. Though a layer of cloth cushioned the impact, the sharp and unexpected pain launched him off his seat. Since the Mini Cooper’s diminutive size didn’t leave much clearance above his head, his skull crashed into the roof. He instinctively lifted his hand to massage it and banged his knuckles against the door.

  Talk about instant karma.

  At least the ordeal took the edge off his unwanted state of arousal. Turning off the camera feed, he brought up a window containing the entirety of her computer’s desktop display. From this point onward, he’d have complete and instant access to everything she found out. The brain-numbing effect of the array of numbers floating on her screen was a welcome relief.

  Maya tinkered with the USB bracelet on her wrist as she stared at trading records for the New York Stock Exchange. She didn’t know why feeling the accessory against her skin calmed her. After all, it hadn’t been a real gift, just a means through which Zack could transfer information. Yet the way he’d clasped the golden braid against her skin held a touch of intimacy—a hint of something more. Talk about an overactive imagination on her part.

  The sun rose on the horizon. It had been ten hours since she’d first loaded the Barn’s usage logs onto her laptop. Though she hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep all night, she felt wide-awake. Adrenaline worked in mysterious ways, and solving puzzles flooded her system with endorphins. Because of her boring life, she appreciated the rush brought on by the chase.

  Few people knew the Treasury Department had a mandate to combat the financing of terrorist and criminal organizations. Their experts identified illegal sources of cash and traced the flow of currency through a labyrinth of overseas financial institutions. Figuring out how bad guys made and transferred their ill-gotten gains was what she did for a living. This line of work taught her one basic truth—money motivated people to do stupid things. The smarter the person, the larger the prize needed to be to get them to cross the line. It would take a great deal of cash to tempt someone who worked for the National Security Agency to commit murder.

  While being a forensic accountant required excellent research skills and the ability to grasp complex mathematical concepts, success depended on being able to get into a criminal’s mind. How would she, given an unprecedented level of access to the world’s most comprehensive information database, convert this knowledge into cash? More importantly, what types of transactions presented the lowest risk of detection? Perpetrators never start out as criminal masterminds. They begin small and
grow bolder with time. Finding their earlier mistakes was always much easier than searching for the most current violation.

  So what could a federal agent rationalize away as a victimless crime at the outset? Working within those parameters, it became a simple matter of finding patterns in the data. One of the reasons the American public had been so nonchalant about the existence of the Barn, the revelation of which ignited vitriolic outcries on the international stage, was its semblance of impartiality. This bank of servers recorded and sifted through every single electronic communication in the United States and abroad, but the very vastness of its scope limited the degree to which privacy and individual liberty could be breached. The government didn’t have the resources to get into everyone’s business, and the assumption, as verbalized to perfection by the US president, was that in-depth scrutiny would be localized to imminent threats.

  She needed to double-check her work, but after hours of sifting through columns of repeating numbers, her gut told her she’d found the culprit. Just as she was about to retrace her footsteps, a black webcam window flashed open on her screen. The feed seemed unaffiliated with any software, and she was sure she hadn’t clicked on something by accident. Crap. She’d been hacked—probably by the NSA.

  Zack’s face, half-covered in what stretched the definition of a five o’clock shadow, appeared a second later. His eyes bloodshot, he yawned. “God, woman, the suspense is killing me. You solved it, so spill.”

  He’d almost given her a panic attack. What did he have to complain about?

  She lifted her hand to scratch her nose, pausing when another window opened to display her own image alongside his. She dropped her arm. Nothing made a girl more self-conscious than streaming video. “I haven’t figured out shi—anything.” She frowned. “And how would you know if I did?”

  He rolled his eyes. “You had that look on your face. You know what I’m talking about—the light-bulb expression. Your eyes get huge, and then you chew on your lower lip for the next five hours while redoing every single line of a multivariate proof. Since I don’t have a clue why you made the face, you’re going to have to give me the deets.”

  “How long have you been spying on me?” Remembering what she’d been doing in the bathroom earlier, her cheeks warmed. “Are there cameras in here? Did you bug the place?”

  He answered with a scoff. “Who do you think I am, James Bond? All I did was ghost your computer. Looking at numbers moving around the screen got boring hours ago, so I switched on your webcam. Don’t worry. I was watching Battlestar Galactica, not you. I happened to glance over when you had your ‘Aha!’ moment.”

  She should have known the sneaky little hacker would pull a stunt like this. If they got through this quagmire in once piece, a conversation about boundaries seemed in order. “I don’t like making accusations before I’m absolutely sure—”

  He popped what looked like a coffee bean into his mouth “Yes, yes, I’ve heard this speech. Pretend you’re bouncing a theory off a colleague, one who is fully aware of the slim possibility you’ve missed a decimal point. And hurry up. I sense a caffeine crash coming.”

  She sighed and tried to figure out how to boil down the complicated interlinking of numbers into words he’d understand. He might be a computer genius, but he really didn’t like math.

  “Are you going to say something or just squint at the spreadsheets until I fall asleep?”

  Scowling, she got over her self-consciousness and scratched her very itchy nose. “Okay, okay. So the logs you stole prove without a doubt that the users are a huge, corroded, rotten, weak link in the government’s surveillance plan. A ton of NSA agents were doing naughty stuff—harmless stupid things like reading the e-mails of people they knew, checking up on girlfriends and cheating husbands, or in one perfectly understandable case, looking into their teenage son’s excessive activity on Starcraft. The less scrupulous ones peeked at bank records of dying relatives, their spouse’s private credit card statements, and some medical records here or there.”

  Looking straight at the camera, he cleaned off the front of his teeth with his tongue. “So, nothing bad enough to commit murder over.”

  Since there had been some chocolate staining, she let the offensive breach of webcam etiquette slide. “Yup, and these guys were looking at random stuff. I don’t think they had access to the loophole that lets them intercept and change things.”

  “So why are we talking about them?”

  For someone who had come begging for help, he seemed awful pushy. “Because it’s important to build a hypothesis on as much data as possible. Besides, this might come in handy when you go to the press. Jealous boyfriends and overprotective moms make far more sensational stories than short-selling.”

  “Which is….” He rubbed his chin. “Sorry, I got nothing.”

  She lifted her gaze to the ceiling. It never ceased to amaze her how educated and intelligent individuals could be so clueless when it came to financial markets. It didn’t help that her friend’s curly locks and amber eyes had allowed him to charm his way through Econ 101. Brilliant as his mind might be, the man was a one trick pony, his talents confined to code. “We’ll get to that. Where was I? Oh, a handful—as in five or six agents out of the hundreds who worked at the NSA—figured out they could use the intel to profit from insider trading.”

  When her statement met with a bleary-eyed blink, she elaborated, “They accessed e-mail communications, travel records, and credit card transactions of high-ranking executives of various Fortune 500 companies, and used that information to pick stock to invest in. Since they had no link to the businesses in question, their trading activity didn’t raise any red flags with the Security and Exchanges Commission. They were smart enough to keep the buying and selling activity small, and masked the trades by going through mutual and index funds instead of buying individual shares.”

  He made a forward-circling motion with his finger. “Let’s move on. Are we still on the dudes who are looking and not modifying? You have a sexy voice, but this gibberish is putting me to sleep.”

  Her cheeks burned. She hated how a casual compliment from him affected her more than anyone else’s more overt declarations of interest. Digging her fingernails into her palms, she reminded herself of the debacle that had ensued the last time she’d misinterpreted his intentions. “You’re right. Even though it’s very illegal, these guys weren’t hurting anyone. But investing in good stock is a long game. Too many factors contribute to an increased market value. You can put money in a solid, profitable company and still end up in the red depending on investor expectations, so it’s not a get-rich-easy scheme. Which is why only one of the five guys I was looking at stood out.”

  Her audience lifted his arms, stretched, and winced when his fists seemed to collide with something above. “Hallelujah, we’ve arrived at the fucking point. Can you please give me the dude’s name so we can get on with our lives?”

  She jabbed her index finger at the webcam. “As long as you understand it’s a working theory, and that I’m not going to act on it until there isn’t a shred of doubt in my mind.”

  He steepled his fingers, cleared his throat, and did a horrible impression of Jon Stewart. “Go on….”

  “First, I need to explain what short-selling is.”

  A groan crackled over the speakers. “For the love of all that’s holy—”

  “Do you want the name or not?”

  His shoulders slumped. “Yes, Professor Jain. Please continue.”

  “It’ll just take a second.” She pouted. After months of being on the run, she couldn’t fathom why he was so impatient. “Not many people know this, but you can bet on share prices going down. Basically, you agree to provide other investors with a stock you don’t have yet at a pre-determined price, with the promise of delivery by a certain date in the future. Then you wait for the value to plummet, buy up the orders you need, and fulfill your initial contract at a huge profit.”

  His brows furrowed, bu
t he seemed slightly more interested in the conversation. “How do you know if a stock will go down?”

  “You can’t without insider knowledge, not with any reliability, anyway. You could, of course, come up with very accurate predictions if you were the one to, let’s say, make it go down.”

  “And this guy, who you refuse to name because it forces me to listen to your detailed explanation of the how and why of it all, figured out how to do that.”

  She glared at him. Considering the circumstances, a bit of appreciation for her efforts and some respect for her genius wouldn’t hurt. “Yes, and his name is Roger Simelach. He’s the NSA Assistant Secretary of Systems Security. I’m pretty sure he’s the only one who knows about the exploit that allowed documents to be altered. Everyone else was just using what was there. This guy went in and made changes—clerical errors that cost companies millions of dollars and caused their share prices to plummet.”

  “What kind of errors?”

  Tears fogged her eyes for a moment as she thought about the loss of life resulting from a government’s negligence and one man’s greed. “He started by altering specifications for a few manufactured goods, creating faulty products and expensive recalls. I’m not an expert, but I think he doctored clinical trial results of a drug on the verge of getting FDA approval. A few weeks after he swapped some numbers around, the company released a statement delaying the release. I also found modified procurement requests for a shipment of antibiotics coinciding with media reports of a TB epidemic that wiped out a small village in Africa. Each time these ‘random snafus’ surfaced, stocks tanked.”